Until this week, I hadn’t heard of Bookface – a craze among book lovers which, so I’m told, has been sweeping Instagram in the past couple of years. It’s a simple idea: you find a book with a face, or some other body part (the mind boggles), on the cover and pose behind it for a selfie, in such a way that the two images merge into one. Here’s one of me with my first YA novel, Flip, which was taken during a visit to a local school. I’ll leave you to judge whether it’s me or the book that’s upside down and back to front.

Copies of the Polish edition of Flip arrived this morning, following its publication there earlier this month. It was my first glimpse of the cover design (which I’m pleased and relieved to say I like very much!) And they’ve kept the English title, too.

This edition is published by the Foksal group, based in Warsaw, which will also be bringing out my second teen/YA novel, Never Ending, in due course as part of its growing list of young adult fiction. I am grateful to Tatiana and Piotr Grzegorzewska for their work and skill in translating Flip.

I’m delighted to receive the following email from the librarian at a school in East Renfrewshire, Scotland:

Just had to let you know about a boy in my S3 (15). He is a boy who never reads and would never usually willingly go near the library, let alone a book. As part of a project I got him started on Flip. He devoured and loved it. He told me it completely messed with his head (in a good way).
So thanks from a librarian, who also loved Flip, for helping this boy realise that there are ALL sorts of books out there for ALL sorts of people.
best regards,
D.B.

As feedback goes, that’s about as good as it gets for a teen/YA author.

An exciting double whammy this week, with the signing of a contract with the publishers Foksal, in Warsaw, for Polish-language editions of both Flip and Never Ending.
Some of my adult novels have been published in Poland but this is my first foray into that country with my teenage fiction.

A piece of festive cheer – Flip is one of nine teen/YA novels featured on the Movellas website during December as part of a World Book Day promotion, which has been running throughout 2013. The promotion includes a free extract of the opening three chapters and a free app to download and read excerpts from all of the selected books. This month’s line-up includes James Dashner, Richelle Mead and David Levithan.

Movellas is an excellent site. Primarily aimed at young people, it is an online social community for reading, writing and sharing stories. Members can publish their own stories – or ‘movellas’ – on the site for others to read and give feedback. Thousands of pieces across a wide range of genres – by aspiring as well as established writers – are available to read online or download. There’s also a blog, a forum, competitions, author interviews and writing tips.
Well worth checking out at www.movellas.com.

I’m very flattered to hear that Flip has been included on a list of Good Books Not To Be Missed by the international Kids’ Lit Quiz organisation. The reading list, compiled by KLQ’s founder and globe-trotting quizmaster, Wayne Mills, is aimed at advanced teenage readers and includes novels by some of the leading authors in contemporary young-adult fiction – Patrick Ness, Mark Haddon, Suzanne Collins, Stephenie Meyer, Mal Peet, Siobhan Dowd and Charlie Higson, to name just a few. I’m honoured to be in their company. I had the pleasure of meeting Wayne a couple of years ago when I was the guest author at a regional heat of the Kids’ Lit Quiz – a brilliant annual competition aimed at promoting reading among children aged 10-13, in which thousands of teams from schools in the UK, Australia, the USA, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa compete for a place in the grand final.

I’ve read 12 of the books on the list in the For Advanced Readers category and they include some of my favourite teen/YA fiction of recent years – Elsewhere; Gone; The Knife of Never Letting Go; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; Impossible; Stolen and The Book Thief.

I’m normally a stickler for correct spelling but I’m prepared to make allowances (for example, when someone is saying nice things about one of my books). That’s certainly the case for the unnamed young American reader who posted a 5-star review of Flipon the website of the Hillsdale Free Public Library, Hillsdale, New Jersey, as part of the library’s children’s and teens’ Summer Reading Program. Here’s what he/she wrote:
“It’s always a good story when you’re following a character who is dealing with a realistically impossible problem. Loved. It. Looooved Ittt.”

From time to time, newspaper reviews of my novels find their way to me – some from far-flung places and others from closer to home. But the two that turned up in the last few days could hardly have come from more diverse sources.

First, I received a clipping from the Ham & High (otherwise known as the Hampstead and Highgate Express, in north London) which selected Flipin its round-up of recommended summer reads and gave it a very nice write-up. Then, at the weekend, another review described Flip as “an intriguing new look at body swapping . . . a great read for anyone who thinks waking up as someone else would solve their problems”. The reviewer was Laala Kashef Alghata and the piece appeared in the Gulf Daily News – ‘The Voice of Bahrain’.

I’ve been delighted and flattered to receive fanmail from all over the world since Flip was published, but this week I got my first email from a reader in Lebanon. And a very nice one it is too.
Here it is, in full, reproduced with her permission:

“Hello there! My name is Margaux Essey, I’m 16 years old, and I’m writing to you from Lebanon.

I just wanted to let you know that I have just finished reading Flip today, and I bought it 3 days ago. What an amazing book! Wow! I am a person who loves to read, and I was looking for something new and came across it. How? Well, I saw a girl in my class reading it and the upside down cover caught my eye. I picked it up and, let me tell you, I was seriously intrigued. I begged my mom to take me to the bookstore and I bought it as fast as I could.

I really want to show all my affection for this book. Alex is a very likable character and the story is so believable, I fear it may happen to myself. The real Phillip is some cool dude with an awesome goth
sister and, honestly, the contrast between Alex and Flip just made Alex’s panic even more secular.

I love love LOVE this book! I especially felt bad when he visited his own house and his father kicked him out…

I brought this book with me to school and everyone is stopping by at my desk to see this strange book. Believe it or not, I got 5 other people waiting to borrow it from me or buy it! I can’t wait to see
what they think of the book. As for myself, the ending was very satisfying, although I would’ve liked to know more about what happened to the real Flip.

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